lordmyk | Entries tagged with final fantasy

My first experience with Final Fantasy IV was with the Nintendo 3DS remake and even without that game's bells and whistles, I still found it to be one of the most enjoyable games of the series. At least, so far. It was the first game for the Super Nintendo and the second available in the United States and, for me, is the first in the series to feel like what I think a Final Fantasy game should be. Unlike the previous games in the series, each character is locked into their job and so the game knows what you'll be capable of at each stage of the story and so each enemy is tailor-made to be defeated by a specific set of skills. The issue with this is that you'll get used to a character and then, wham, they're out of the game. This was fixed in the remakes, allowing you to eventually retrieve the different party members, but as this is based exclusively on the original version this option isn't available. However, as each boss is supposed to be defeated in a certain way, this hardly matters in the wrong run.

The game's story is one of its strong suits, featuring your protagonist Cecil (who can be renamed, along with everyone else in the game, something unavailable in the voice-acted 3DS remake) coming to terms with his role in his king's murderous campaign against darn near everyone and making amends for both his past deeds and those of his monarch. Along the way, he makes a number of friends and enemies. There's also giant robots and trips to the moon, which are always fun for all involved.

My sole criticism of the game is that it's a fan of making you think one of your party members has made a noble sacrifice only to later reveal that, nope, they're actually still alive. This happens with nearly every character in the game at one point, with only one remaining dead, something which feels rather emotionally manipulative. I also didn't really like Edge all that much, an arrogant ninja prince who joins you late in the game, but in a game with such a wide cast there's bound to be a few characters who aren't all that great.

Next up: Final Fantasy V, a game which I know absolutely nothing about.

There was a small trend on the Nintendo Entertainment System (and its Japanese equivalent, the Famicom) where the second installment of a game would alter the first game's formula only to return to and improve upon the first game's base. This could be seen with Castlevania, Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, and of course Final Fantasy. In this case, the level-up system of the second game has returned to something similar to the first game, along with being able to choose a definitive class for each of your characters. The twist in Final Fantasy III is that now you could change those classes on a whim with the introduction of the job system. This, coupled with a map fully three times the size of the previous games, makes this a far more robust experience than Final Fantasy I and II and makes the fact that those two games were released on a single cartridge while Final Fantasy III was given a 3DS remake make more sense.

There were aspects of this game I enjoyed a lot more than the previous games, with more to explore and NPCs which were more fully realized. There's even brief cinematics littered throughout the game. This did seem to come at a cost to your protagonists and their personalities, and since the game could never be sure who you were bringing to a fight a lot of the bosses were fairly easy. There were only two instances where a certain job would be beneficial, both times heavily hinted at in the game itself. The protagonists, a group of four orphans initially called Onion Knights (and whom are given names and whatnot in the 3DS remake), also lack any motivation other than being chosen to go on this mission though the game's still enjoyable despite this. It's certainly a fuller game experience than the first two, and if you do choose to fully explore the world you'll find a lot to like and things to help you in your quest to stop the darkness from taking over the land. There was also a moment when I flew off the initial map and discovered another full map beneath it which would have blown my mind as a kid though I doubt I ever would have gotten that far.

If I had gotten that far, then there is a point when I would have just completely given up, and that's the last area of the game which is called the Dark World. The most powerful enemies in the game dwell here, and not just as one of the five bosses you have to face, but just wandering around the map. In fact, the man the game had thus far claimed was the ultimate evil and provided one of the more difficult boss fights in the game is just wandering around. You might have to fight him at any point in the Dark World, and you better hope you stocked up on whatever items you needed before you came here because once you're in the Dark World there's no escape. It's a treacherous slog of grinding and trying vainly to make some progress, any progress at all, and the only mercy is that you can save at any time in the Pixel Remaster. You couldn't do that in the original version of the game, so anyone who beat that is not someone you should mess with.

To be fair, the Dark World does get easier once you've defeated one of the four sub-bosses, as you can then use the crystal they were guarding to heal yourself indefinitely. This, coupled with the ability to turn off encounters and boost the experience you get from winning fights, gradually makes the Dark World less of a terror. You still have to contend with several enemies who can completely kill your party with one attack if you're not careful or strong enough, including the final boss who just keeps shooting your entire party with a particle beam that'll kill your entire party in three shots if you're not lucky.

In short, outside of a lack of protagonist personality and a punishing ultimate area, this game defintiely represented a step in a positive direction and showed the world what a Final Fantasy could be. Now, if they hadn't decided that part of this was an absolutely brutal final area, that would have been great but there's not a lot we can do about that now.

My previous attempts to play Final Fantasy II were few, mainly on the Game Boy Advance after beating Final Fantasy, as the two were on the same cartridge and what else was I going to do? I knew little about it, as my knowledge of the games jumped from the first one to the seventh one with bits and pieces from the others thrown in and so I was unprepared for its unique leveling system which didn't grant you experience and levels like many RPGs, but did something akin to an Elder Scrolls game and gave you a bit of experience every time you used a specific weapon, spell, or got hit. I was prepared to deal with this when I was in high school, but I had missed some bit of dialogue and wandered around the overworld completely lost thinking that I might revisit the game again someday.

That day finally came when I started on the Pixel Remaster, and I managed to figure out what I needed to do since I forgot about about an NPC that needed to be told a certain phrase. Which is the other major thing FFII brought to the series, random words and phrases you had to learn and use on various NPCs. It's a nice idea, but seemed largely inconsequential since it's not like using the wrong phrase on the wrong person would have any consequences.

I didn't talk about the first game's story at all, but while it was a very basic "go save the world from evil" sort of thing it didn't feel like it needed to be explained. This one was a wee bit more complex, as the evil is some Emperor and fighting with the rebels against his forces actually brings about changes to the game world and since you have a set character and companions (one of which swaps in and out throughout the story) it feels more like you're actually playing a role than just a Black Mage or Warrior whose characteristics you keep inside your head. That said, there aren't a lot of choices to make with these characters, except for in one section where you can try to fight a bunch of soldiers who overpowered me quickly and seemed easier to avoid.

The game's attempted innovations were laudable, and for something that was originally a Nintendo game it's fun to see this amount of attempted complexity. I do wish seeing your progress with your weapons was a bit easier (there's red bars but I would have liked numerical signifiers after each battle, like my skill with a sword went up four points and needs sixteen to get to the next level or something) and the larger amount of actual NPCs did help flesh out the game world and made it feel more like I was fighting for something.

The weirdest part of the game, by the way, is when you encounter a bunch of large beavers and one of your characters (named Gus, though I renamed mine Hugo) announces that he can speak beaver. This is apparently part of his established backstory though as far as I know there's no real way to access this information within the game. This is also the first game with a battle designed that you can't win, which is always such a welcome surprise.

The second Final Fantasy was certainly a worthwhile experience and, once I got the hang of its idiosyncrasies, one which didn't overstay its welcome. And now I go on to the third one.

At one point in my life, I had it in my head to figure out a way to play a lot of the Final Fantasy games though I was unsure how I would go about it due to their bizarre releases in America. The first two games were easily available and I even had their Game Boy Advance remake, though I had a bizarre amount of trouble trying to figure out where to go in Final Fantasy II. The third and fourth games were available on the Nintendo DS, though these were re-done in 3-D with voice-overs and all that. I believe the fifth was available on the original PlayStation, while the sixth had a Game Boy Advance port which was stupidly expensive to get. Everything past the seventh was easily obtainable, and I've played most of them to some degree. As time passed, the urge to play through all of them faltered because the thought of bouncing back and forth between all these consoles was too much of an annoyance, as well as having to buy a lot of them. It just wasn't worth it.

Now, years later, every single one (more or less) is available for the Nintendo Switch and so I've started on this mad quest starting, of course, with Final Fantasy. As mentioned, I played it on the Game Boy Advance (as well as a little bit on the original Nintendo though I was unable to understand what was going on at the time) and beat it, though it had updated a few things such as abandoning the original's Dungeons and Dragons style spell slots in favor of the more typical mana pool. It turns out that, if you know what you're doing, you can beat this in about a day and while it's an enjoyable day it's still a relatively short game.

The major thing I liked about the game was how much customizability you had for your party, where you could just make everyone whatever you liked (within reason) and name them whatever you like. The character designs are also fairly iconic, being revisited quite a lot over the years, though I didn't much care for the Black Mage's upgraded form. There's honestly not much more I can say about this game, but it's a worthwhile if threadbare experience.

When I was younger, my first RPG (role-playing game) was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. My cousin had Final Fantasy and I had tried it a few times but I was young and had no idea what was going on with all the menus and whatnot and so I just ignored it, for the most part. I still wasn't sure what the genre meant until I Super Mario RPG in an issue of Disney Adventures and I saw multiple characters on the screen and just thought, "Oh, it must be multiplayer, so that means we can rent it when my cousin comes over and we can play at the same time." This did not work as intended as, like many RPG video games, this one was only meant for one player. Still, I played it as much as I could during the rental period and while I still didn't fully understand it, I was starting to and I eventually bought the game.

I still didn't fully understand it but I gradually figured out what was going on and so, in time, I beat the game and sometimes went back to play through it again. It wasn't until high school (or perhaps a bit after) when I discovered two things:

1. There was a secret area called Grate Guy's Casino where I'd never been.
2. There was a secret optional boss named Culex, based on the boss fights from the SNES (Super Nintendo) era Final Fantasy games.

The rumors were that Culex was the most difficult boss in the game, and while I had beaten it I'd also had trouble with another optional boss named Jinx and so decided that I didn't care about Culex all that much. Getting into the casino was far more important a goal, and I remember spending at least one afternoon trying to figure out how to get into the stupid thing until I gave up and went on with my life, occasionally thinking, "Maybe I should play the game again, try to get into that casino."

Luckily, the game got a re-release late last year and once I started playing it, I made the vow that this would be the time I'd get into the casino and see all its glory. I made my way through the game (which seemed much easier than I remembered, which is partially due to increased skill with RPGs and partially because they made some tweaks with the game) and got the item which would allow me access into the casino and, on a lark, the item which would allow me to battle Culex should I choose to do so.

Last night was the night I decided to finally enter the casino. I knew the method and got in there with little trouble, and after years of anticipation, I found a single little house with a single little room which even Grate Guy himself found boring. I played a matching game (in the SNES version, I understand it was Blackjack) and something similar but not a slot machine (in the SNES version, it was a slot machine) and finally a little thing in which Grate Guy wanted me to guess which way he'd be looking.

I was incredibly underwhelmed, and had I found this during my initial play-through of the game, I'd be quite put-out that I'd put any effort at all into finding the casino. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't what I got.

Filled with disappointment, I then went to fight Culex and while the battle took longer than anticipated because I also hadn't known during my initial play-through that one of Mallow's abilities (a little fluffy man who has weather-based magic) would bring up little tidbits when scanning an enemy and now I was trying to see them all and having this little man try to scan what amounted to a pixelated dark god with four magic crystals, each of which also needed to be scanned, resulted in most of my party being killed again and again and relying on Princess Peach to revive them. This actually made things easier as Culex and his gems ran out of FP by the time I was ready to actually fight them and so I defeated the fabled secret boss and felt like playing more 90's era Final Fantasy games afterwards.

I guess the moral of the story is that sometimes the things you've been trying to avoid for years wind up being more pleasurable than those that you've awaited and have built up in your head. Also, after I beat Culex I figured I could go fight Jinx (who is a little bug thing) and I did and beat him easily.

Also: I am going to watch the next movie soon, I just haven't had the time or inclination to do so.